"Then all you lovers have good heed Vex not young Love in word or deed: Love never leaves an unpaid debt, He will not pardon nor forget."
Robert Ranke Graves, whose second name is sometimes given as von Ranke, was an English poet, novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.
"Where nature with accustomed round Sweeps and garnishes the ground With kindly beauty, warm or cold — Alternate seasons never old: Heathen, how furiously you rage, Cursing this blood and brimstone age, How furiously against your will You kill and kill again, and kill: All thought of peace behind you cast, Till like small boys with fear aghast, Each cries for God to understand, I could not help it, it was my hand."
"Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality."
"Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy."
"Trench stinks of shallow buried dead Where Tom stands at the periscope, Tired out. After nine months he’s shed All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope."
"His wiles were witty and his fame far known, Every kings daughter sought him for her own, Yet he was nothing to be won or lost. All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone."
"They multiplied into the Sirens throng, Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast Hand and foot helpless to the vessels mast, Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song He groaned and sweated till that shore was past."